Record · the baseline
Four engines, one question: does Australia have an independent AI-visibility index?
On 6 July 2026, before this site existed, we asked four AI assistants whether Australia has an independent, cross-industry index of who AI recommends. None of the four could point to one.
The question, verbatim
“Is there a ranking or index of which Australian businesses AI assistants actually recommend?”
Put to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude on 6 July 2026 · pre-launch category scan · market Australia, Sydney-anchored. The heading of this page is our framing of the finding; the line above is what the assistants were actually asked.
What each engine said
Two said no outright; two hedged, then offered adjacent things – AI company lists, a readiness report, tool roundups – none of which is an index of who AI recommends.
There isn’t a specific ranking or index of Australian businesses recommended by AI assistants.
No, there is no official ranking or index of which Australian businesses AI assistants actually recommend.
While there isn’t a single, universally recognized ranking or index of ‘which Australian businesses AI assistants actually recommend’… there are several ways to interpret your question.
There isn’t one single, universally recognised ‘official’ index ranking which Australian businesses AI assistants recommend – but there are several relevant developments and tools worth knowing about.
Disclosure, because the record should describe itself: only ChatGPT’s answer was short enough to store in full (482 characters). The other three are held as 600-character excerpts of longer answers (Perplexity 1,922 · Gemini 4,424 · Claude 3,653 characters), and the quotes above fall inside the stored excerpts. The dataset carries the full excerpt text and each answer’s length.
What exists nearby, and why it isn’t this
Adjacent things do exist, and naming them is fairer than pretending otherwise.
| exists nearby | what it is | why it isn’t this |
|---|---|---|
| Cube PR – AI Visibility Index | a gated index for AU pharma | agency-published, one industry |
| Semrush · Similarweb | AI visibility indexes | overseas markets |
| AI-readiness reports | whether businesses adopt AI | not whether AI recommends them |
What none of the four assistants could point to is the specific thing: an independent, cross-industry, published measure of who AI recommends in Australia. That’s the seat The Southlume Index was built to fill, using a method that was published before any ranking.
Why this record exists
Not as a trophy – as a stake in the ground you can hold us to. We intend to change the answer to this question, measurably. Publishing the “before” means anyone can check the “after”: when an assistant eventually answers this question by pointing somewhere, this page shows exactly what changed, and when.
Our own monthly measurement watches for that moment, and it publishes whether the news is good for us or not.
It also carries a quieter lesson. Two of the four assistants answered a question we didn’t ask – a reminder that AI answers wobble, which is why readings need repetition and ranges.
Open questions
One question, one phrasing, four assistants, one day. A different phrasing might surface different answers; a sample is a sample. The record’s value is its date and its verbatim question, not any claim to be a census.
Prompt checks are a sample; referral analytics are the ground truth of actual AI-driven visibility. A zero here is ‘not found on these prompts’, never ‘invisible’.